Saturday, 18 August 2012

WIP: Gaming Table 2.0 (Part One)

A decent gaming space is one of the essentials of the war-gaming hobby. All gamers need a suitable palce to game, whether it’s a club, store, or the dinner table at home. Some like to go further, and create their own table on which to enjoy battle after battle. This is what I’m doing.

Well, this is the second attempt. As you may have noticed from previous posts, and as shown above I’ve used a rather small gaming space on occasion. It turns out it was way too small and unsuitable. 3ft X 3.5ft. It may not sound much different to the new 4x4 board, but it works out as a lot less room to game on. It meant there was nowhere near enough space for anything over 800 points, and even that was a struggle. It would be suitable if I played more skirmish games, like Bushido. As well, as this, the existing structure of the table was unsuitable. The pinned wood frame kept popping away from the board, and that, amongst other factors, lead to the development of Gaming Table 2.0.

Now, it doesn’t look like much now, but it’s a perfect start. I got an 8ft by 2ft MDF board from UK store Homebase, for £13. It sounds cheap, and gets better. The staff also cut it into four 2x2 near-perfect squares for free. Now this saves a lot of hastle, armache and removes the risk of cutting it wrong. Also, the wood is fairly thick, and does not flex in the same way the old table did.

This is only the beginning, there is much more to do. The next stage of the table is to paint it in a more desert-like scheme, possibly with roads too. Now I could sand it like the last table, but it was incredibly labour intensive, time consuming, and often rubbed off (and was rather abrasive on skin). It may not look as good as the first, but its far more suitable for easy storage. I could always mix in sand with the paint to help with texture.

Terrain is also under development. With table 2.0, I want to have fully modular terrain. Two problems have been solved with this. Firstly, it means tha battlefield is infinitely customisable. Secondly, it means I can reuse the old boards and made terrain bases. Talk about green-gaming.

Hopefully, more progress will be made in the coming weeks, and I can update you with how it is going. You can keep up with the project inbetween posts by joining the Facebook page. Get bonus content including extra pictures, sneak previews and general gaming discussions.